"West Side Story famously reworks Romeo and Juliet, which resurfaces again in the 1990s, in a movie featuring contemporary teen culture and automatic pistols...Hamlet comes out as a new film every couple of years, it seems" (How to Read Literature Like a Professor Foster pg 39).

Institutions of higher learning can no longer blithely that everyone in class is a Christian, and if they do, it's at their own risk. Still, no matter what your religious beliefs, to get tha most out of your reading of European and American literature, knowing something about the New and Old Testaments is essential. Foster p. 118 No matter what you are reading some words are recognized as words that make Christ who he is. Self sacrificing, believed to have walked on water, buried, but arose on the third day, very forgiving. These are all examples of words that you have heard and will recognize whereever you read them. They do not only appera in a religious writing.

“What we mean in speaking of ‘myth’ in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry- all very highly useful and informative in their own right-can’t. That explanation takes the shape of stories that are deeply ingrained in our group memory, that shape our culture and are in turn shaped by it, that constitute a way of seeing by which we read the world and, ultimately, ourselves” (Foster 65).

"When someone asks about meaning, I usually come back with something clever like, 'Well what do you think?' Everyone thinks I'm either being a wise guy or ducking responsibility, but neither is the case. Seriously, what do you think it stands for, because that's probably what it does. At least for you" (Foster, ch 12, pg 97).

"Let's think about two catergories of violence in literature: the specific injury that authors cause characters to visit on one another or on themselves, and the narrative violence that causes characters harm in general" (Foster 89).

"Different time, different place, same medtation upon greed, gratitude, miscalculation, and love. Titles? William Faulkner liked The Sound and The Fury. Aldous Huxley decided on Brave New World. Agatha Christie chose By the Picking of My Thumbs, which statement Ray Bradbury completed with Something Wicked This Way Comes."

"Here's the problem with symbols: people expect them to mean something. Not just any something, but one something in particular. Exactly. Maximum. You know what? It doesn't work like that. Oh, sure, there are some symbols that work straightforwardly: a white flag means, I give up, don't shoot. Or it means we come in peace. See? Even in a fairly clear-cut case we can't pin down a single meaning, although they're pretty close." (Foster 97-8)

Greek and Roman myth is so much a part of the fabric of our consciousness, of our unconscious really, that was scarcely notice. you doubt me? in the town where i life, the college teams are known as the Spartans. our high school? the Trojans. in my state we have a troy(one of whose high schools is athens-and they say there are no comedians in education), an ithaca, a Sparta, a Romulus, a Remus, and a Rome. (Foster 66)